Ultra Street Fighter IV

I would usually get this kind of game on my 360 but on the current promotion i'm thinking of getting it on the PC.

What pad would you recommend for playing this on the PC. Would you say the xbox360 wired controller is the best? As i find the 360 pad while very good overall has a not so good D-Pad, which isn't what you want for a beat'em up.

I use a 360 wired pad.. got it configurd nicely took me a while to set it up right. You don't really use the Dpad... works quite nicely. Unfortuantely you can kind of tell when your up against people using actual joy sticks.. they are mostly the highest grade players. All in all the way I set up my 360 pad works quite nicely and/comfortably granted I think if you want to compete at the highest levels you need a joy stick.. you can see the crap /cheap **** they are able to pull off with one =)

dont agree with willy. PS3 Tournament Edition Fightstick is WAY better ;D but seriously dude, you don't actually have to buy a fightstick to play SFIV. it's good to learn the game with a fightstick from the start, but it's only worth the investment if you're going to play ALOT. I just recently bought a fightstick and I used to play pretty good with a PS3 pad.

Go for keyboard. I know it sounds ridiculous, but trust me it's worth it. It's an optional prerequisite for the Hitbox, yeah the one that everybody say it's rigged since you can execute at ridiculous speeds with low chance of misinputs. Newsflash for you, keyboard is very much the same. Using the hitbox on keyboard (which puting space as up) will take you a week or two to get used to. I also have some proper recommendations on what keys to set it up as, USB type keyboards friendly. If you do decide to go with an arcade stick however, the keyboard can still help you develop plinking and option selects.

I've played sf2 and sf4 on keyboard competitively for a good month or so, then decided to make myself a HitBox, and it's been going amazing.